(no subject)
Did anyone see the latest episode of QI this weekend? I swear to god, either John Lloyd has just been reading Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, or else hobnobofjoy read my post about it and passed on the details, because every damn question was lifted straight from the book!
It was the perfect source, I guess, for a France-themed episode. They even had a picture round on the shepherds in Les Landes who went around on stilts, a photo from the book which I was about to make into an LJ icon. Goddamn it, if I'd been on the show I'd have got practically 100%!
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For the last couple of days I've been reading a copy of Francois Villon's collected poems. I didn't know much about him before, but Andrew Hussey's Paris: A Secret History devotes a chapter to him and I was intrigued. He was the prototypical bohemian drop-out, a 15th-century wastrel and thief who hung around the university and drank too much. He had to leave Paris several times after he killed a priest in a pub fight.
His most famous line is the refrain to one of the brilliant ballads which are part of his monumental Testament, the ballad being a typical Ubi sunt style lament about beautiful women who are no more. Here's a stanza to give you an idea:
La Royne blanche comme liz,
Qui chantoit à voix de seraine,
Berte au plat pié, Bietrix, Aliz,
Haranburgis qui tint le Maine,
Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu'Engloys brulerent à Rouen,
Où sont ilz, où, Vierge souveraine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'anten?
(The Queen as white as a lily
Who sang in a siren's voice;
Bertha Broadfoot, Beatrix, Alice;
Erembourg, who ruled over Maine;
And Joan, that heroine from Lorraine,
Whom the English burned in Rouen -
Where are they, where, holy Virgin?
-Well, where is last year's snow?)
The final line is of course the source of that familiar rhetorical question, Where are the snows of yesteryear? This interested me, because in the Middle French it's very clear that anten is being used in its true original sense of "last year" (it comes from Latin ante annum). Whereas yesteryear to me implies something much more general along the lines of "times gone by".
Two more interesting facts. Firstly, the English version we are all familiar with was written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (have a read). Secondly, it transpires that Rossetti invented the word yesteryear specifically for this purpose, and intended it exactly to mean "last year" (which is still the only definition given in the OED).
My translation, above, was done on the spot, and is obviously shit, but I can't help feeling that the poetic lyricism of Rossetti's misses something. Villon was lyrical, but his language was not elevated or consciously literary - he was down-to-earth, clear-sighted, realistic, and funny. To me, the final line is not a wistful rhetorical question, but rather a witty and somewhat cheeky comeback.
It was the perfect source, I guess, for a France-themed episode. They even had a picture round on the shepherds in Les Landes who went around on stilts, a photo from the book which I was about to make into an LJ icon. Goddamn it, if I'd been on the show I'd have got practically 100%!
-------------------------
For the last couple of days I've been reading a copy of Francois Villon's collected poems. I didn't know much about him before, but Andrew Hussey's Paris: A Secret History devotes a chapter to him and I was intrigued. He was the prototypical bohemian drop-out, a 15th-century wastrel and thief who hung around the university and drank too much. He had to leave Paris several times after he killed a priest in a pub fight.
His most famous line is the refrain to one of the brilliant ballads which are part of his monumental Testament, the ballad being a typical Ubi sunt style lament about beautiful women who are no more. Here's a stanza to give you an idea:
La Royne blanche comme liz,
Qui chantoit à voix de seraine,
Berte au plat pié, Bietrix, Aliz,
Haranburgis qui tint le Maine,
Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu'Engloys brulerent à Rouen,
Où sont ilz, où, Vierge souveraine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'anten?
(The Queen as white as a lily
Who sang in a siren's voice;
Bertha Broadfoot, Beatrix, Alice;
Erembourg, who ruled over Maine;
And Joan, that heroine from Lorraine,
Whom the English burned in Rouen -
Where are they, where, holy Virgin?
-Well, where is last year's snow?)
The final line is of course the source of that familiar rhetorical question, Where are the snows of yesteryear? This interested me, because in the Middle French it's very clear that anten is being used in its true original sense of "last year" (it comes from Latin ante annum). Whereas yesteryear to me implies something much more general along the lines of "times gone by".
Two more interesting facts. Firstly, the English version we are all familiar with was written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (have a read). Secondly, it transpires that Rossetti invented the word yesteryear specifically for this purpose, and intended it exactly to mean "last year" (which is still the only definition given in the OED).
My translation, above, was done on the spot, and is obviously shit, but I can't help feeling that the poetic lyricism of Rossetti's misses something. Villon was lyrical, but his language was not elevated or consciously literary - he was down-to-earth, clear-sighted, realistic, and funny. To me, the final line is not a wistful rhetorical question, but rather a witty and somewhat cheeky comeback.